Keeping multiple severs current with the same patch level
 

Hello All,

I need to keep Dev and Prod boxes at the same patch level. Dev boxes get patched at least two weeks prior to Prod boxes.

How can I get the same patches installed on both boxes?

This is specifically for Redhat. I'll be testing with CentOS however.

This applies to 4.x and 5.x so needs to be done with up2date and yum I think.

I've read about installing yum-downloadonly but not sure if that's what I'm looking for.

What I'd like to do is run yum update --downloadonly --downloaddir=DLDIR on both systems the same day. Any only install on the Dev box. Then install on the Prod box

Is there a way to do something like this?

Thanks

I use openSUSE and have a local mirror of their repository. This I can sync with external ones when I like to do so. And in the meantime all machines using my mirror have the same installation. In your case I would use even two mirrors, so that during testing on the dev machines the actual mirror prod machines can still install from the last mirror.

Thanks for your reply.

SLES is the second part of my question that I didn't even mention. So Dev and Prod boxes apply to both Redhat and Suse.

I have experimented with Redhat(Centos) creating an rsync local mirror. That seems to work well for Centos, but not sure if that can be done with Redhat because of none public rsync mirrors.

Again not sure how that would work with SLES because public rsync mirrors.

with sles you can use smt, with SMT you can mirror the SLES repos. You have to have a subscription for updates though.